


stupid, childish dreams

by nepheneethedestroyer



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Kaladin/Laral if you squint, i have a lot of them, just more Laral feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:09:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27505108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nepheneethedestroyer/pseuds/nepheneethedestroyer
Summary: “We’ll do it,” a voice said from behind him.Kaladin froze.--Or, a slightly-canon-divergent version of Kaladin and Laral's conversation when he returns to Hearthstone. More feelings, from Laral's POV.
Relationships: Kaladin & Laral Wistiow, Kaladin/Laral Wistiow
Comments: 5
Kudos: 34





	stupid, childish dreams

When the guard captain had notified Laral that Lirin’s son had returned, to Hearthstone, a Shardbearer, she was sure that the Heralds were playing the world’s most cruel trick on her.

The captain was going on about how he had stabbed the floor with his Shardblade and that he was demanding horses and maps and spanreed communication to Tashikk to speak to Highprince Dalinar Kholin, but Laral felt she could scarcely breathe, much less absorb so much information. How many years had it been? Six years since they had left.

Six years had passed. And one lifetime, it felt like.

Kaladin’s letter to his parents, notifying them of Tien’s death, arrived within a year of their conscription. Roshone had taken the news with a crowing smile spreading across his jowls, and Laral had felt sick. Tien had been so small, so young, so precious. Not for the first time, she had wanted to run away, back to Hesina and Lirin’s home, to apologize, to say something, anything, but there was nothing she could do, and nothing she could say. Tien was dead, and Kaladin wasn’t coming home. Hesina and Lirin were two sons short. Roshone had won.

The second letter, this one a more formal missive denoting Kaladin’s death, had arrived at Hearthstone just over one year ago. She had felt a similar muted numbness then, too. Shock, then one hot flash of anger, quickly tamped down, then guilt. Guilt, again, at how her husband had sent two boys to their death over the pettiest of reasons, shame at how she had treated Kal the last time they had spoken, at how she couldn’t bear to meet his gaze when Highlord Amaram had read Tien's name off of his list. Then a deadness, creeping out from her gut and filling every vessel in her body, engulfed her. And for the first time since the night before her wedding, tears overcame her, slipping out from tightly shut eyelids.

Laral thought that she had, slowly and over the days and months and years, conquered her weaknesses. Killed those her foolish dreams from childhood, hardened and resolved do the best with what she had. She had lost her mother. Her father. Rillir. Loss was nothing new to her, and yet…

She hadn’t even realized, herself, what Kal had meant to her. No letter meant that he was out there, somewhere, fighting in Brightlord Amaram’s army for Alethkar. With horror, she realized that his letter was dredging up something within her, something she had buried so deep that she had nearly forgotten it. One final, foolish dream. A last vestige of hope that she hadn’t even known she’d been holding on to.

_Kal, if you go to war and find a Shardblade, then you'd be a lighteyes..._

As children, they had been so, so stupid.

But she was a child no longer.

A thump on her thigh and she snapped back to reality, looking at the captain, who had an expectant look on his face. She nodded at the captain in what she hoped was a look equally interpretable as acceptance or dismissal, and it seemed it was the latter he was expecting, as he bowed quickly and exited.

She looked down at the little girl at her side, clutching onto her havah. A messy mop of black hair and a scrunched up face peered back at her solemnly.

“Are you alright, mother?” Shanah had apparently caught on to her mother’s discontent, and Laral smoothed her hand over her daughter’s head lovingly. “Yes, I’m alright,” she said, giving Shanah a smile.

Shanah and Rettar were both reserved children, and Laral could only hope it was their natural propensity, not the environment they had been raised in, that had made them that way. Roshone had never hit her, or them, and he was always present, but in the early years, it was her and the maids who had done all the child-rearing. It had taken slow and measured inroads with her husband for him to involve himself in their lives in anything more than a superficial way, to create even a semblance of a family, of the sort of childhood that Laral herself had been privileged enough to experience.

This is what she had now. This was what was important. There were worse things in the world to have.

She hitched up the skirt of her havah and kneeled down to reach Shanah’s eye level, and took her hand. “I need to take care of some business downstairs,” Laral said gently. “Can you find your brother and play with him upstairs for me?”

Shanah stared at her pensively for a moment, then walked off, twirling her black locks with one finger. When the twins had first begun to walk, Laral had felt like a child parenting her own children. They had just been so quiet, as if they could feel the tension in the house in the air and wanted nothing but to keep it undisturbed, and at her lowest Laral had felt as they were more mature than she.

She stood, closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and steeled herself.

* * *

His voice was the first thing Laral heard. Deeper than she remembered, with an authoritative air to it. The weight and familiarity of it nearly stopped her in her tracks. She felt an involuntary shiver go down her spine, and she curled her hands into fists, squeezing tightly.

“We’re not powerless. We can and will fight back—but first we need to survive. The Everstorm will return. Regularly, though I don’t know the interval yet. I need you to prepare.”

“How?” She heard her husband whisper, faintly.

“Build homes with slopes in both directions. If there’s not time for that, find a sheltered location and hunker down.”

She stepped into the room. Roshone was sitting against the wall, holding his hand to his nose. Some sort of injury? It barely registered.

A tall man with black, shoulder-length hair stood in front of her husband, dressed in what looked like a generic blue soldier’s uniform. He held a bright, dew-colored blade that was nearly his height, point touching the floor.

“I can’t stay. This crisis is bigger than one town, one people, even if it’s my town and my people. I have to rely on you. Almighty preserve us, you’re all we have.”

“We’ll do it,” said Laral with a flat affect that surprised even her with its strength. The man’s blade disappeared as if into the ether, and he turned to face her.

What she saw did not match the image she had held in her head. Kaladin had been a thin, gangly teen when she had last seen him, with the barest bit of baby fat still adorning his jaw and cheeks, eyes awash with horror at her now-husband’s casual cruelty.

The man who confronted her now was no youth. His eyes blazed a brilliant blue, with an intensity that she knew couldn’t be attributed solely to the new glowing color. Sharp red lines were branded onto his forehead. _Sas nahn_. Everything about him looked— felt— sharper. His mouth was set in a harsh line, and when he directed his gaze towards her, she almost took an involuntary step back.

A soldier. A slave. And a Shardbearer. What had he gone through to end up like this?

“Looks like you went and grew up, Kal,” and the ease with which his nickname rolled off her lips, the familiarity of it all hit her with a sense of nausea. She should have said his full name. What right did she have to refer to him in such a friendly manner?

A pause. “I was sorry to hear the news of your brother,” she continued. She hated how clinical she sounded. Hadn’t she been friends with Tien? They had played together, upturning rocks and…she had to have cared more than this.

“The spanreed is upstairs,” she said, somehow getting the words out smoothly without sounding stilted, and turned, unable to bear his glare for another second, walking out of the doorway into the hall.

“Laral,” he said, following.

“I hear you stabbed my floor,” she noted, somehow regurgitating jumbled bits of what the guard captain had told her. “That’s good hardwood, I’ll have you know. Honestly. Men and their weapons.”

A stupid childish quip. How long had it been since she’d said one of those?

Behind her, she heard Kal’s steps pause.

“I dreamed of coming back,” he said, stopping in the hallway outside the library. “I imagined returning here a war hero and challenging Roshone. I wanted to save you, Laral.”

Laral stopped. For a moment she thought she might have to brace her arm against the wall to steady herself. Save her. Challenge Roshone. Save her.

She remembered the twins, holding them as babies.

Save her from what?

“Oh?” She turned back to him.

“I did what you asked,” he whispered softly, stepping closer. “Joined the army. Killed a Shardbearer. Became— one of you.” She thought his eyes might have pulsed then, emitting a stronger glow momentarily, and his brands seemed to strike an even harsher contrast on his forehead. He dwarfed her, now, and her mind wandered back to the past. Was it this hallway or another one, where they had last exchanged words? She thought she had been taller than him, then. She swallowed a pang of sadness for the boy Kal had once been, violently suppressing a feeling that threatened to crawl its way up from her heart and out of her lips.

She held his eye line head-on. “I’m sorry about what happened to Tien,” she repeated, softer this time. “And for whatever happened to you, for what it’s worth.” Almost inexplicably, she felt an urge to brush his hair aside to look closer at the brand, and quashed it. She thought of Shanah and Rettar. Her lovely, beautiful, perfect children. “But what makes you think I need to be saved?”

“You can’t tell me,” Kaladin said softly, waving backward toward the library, “that you’ve been happy with that.”

Laral felt a surge of protectiveness well up within her, even if she knew that he wasn’t referring to her children.

“I would think you would know, better than anyone,” she whispered, eyes traversing up his face to the _sas nahn_ glyph, “that there are far worse things than living a peaceful life, and raising a family in a loveless marriage.”

For the first time, Laral thought she saw the lines in his face soften, the light of his eyes dimming slightly, and she thinks to herself that she can indulge herself this one act.

She gives him a light tap on the cheek, like she does to Shanah and Bettar to get their attention. “Sometimes,” she pauses, choosing her words carefully. “We learn to make the best out of what we are given. And we do.”

She steps back. She knows now that she has almost nothing in common with this dangerous man who stands in front of her, save a stupid childish dream. Best to destroy that, too.

“Becoming a lighteyes does not grant a man any measure of decorum, it appears. You will stop insulting my husband, Kaladin.” She says this louder, even loudly, though the unfamiliar extra syllables feel foreign in her mouth. “Shardbearer or not, another word like that, and I’ll have you thrown from my home.”

Kaladin gives her a slow look of realization, and nods.

**Author's Note:**

> I vomited this out in a few hours after re-reading Kaladin's flashback scenes in preparation for Rhythm of War and getting hit with another truckload of feelings for Laral. While I still adore Laral's characterization from the canon way this scene went down, I just wanted to do a slightly softer, more sympathetic version of this scene from Laral's point of view. Here's to hoping her and Kaladin have at least one more real conversation in RoW :)
> 
> Yes, some of the dialogue is straight from Oathbringer, and Laral's descriptions of Kaladin intentionally mirror his descriptions of her.
> 
> Pretty much unedited because I'm falling asleep and I'll chicken out of posting if I look at this for too long.


End file.
